If the original imported goods that were replaced free of charge without return to exit, the customs shall re- levy imports value-added tax and consumption tax on the original imported goods according to the regulations.

He remembered the impoverished backwater that Singapore was in the 1920’s, and now he saw the gleaming city that free enterprise – together with Lee Kwan Yew’s quasi-authoritarian leadership – had wrought.

Years of Western-backed repressive authoritarianism nipped in the bud any potential growth of a liberal alternative to the incumbent Arab regimes, and turned any abrupt move to free elections into a dangerous exercise in Islamic democracy.